no one was hyping this card, we kinda knew what we are going to get. the only remaining question is power consumption.
with a ~GTX680 performance, this card could be a boon to gamers on a budget with old cards.
I think there was hype, similar to Tonga. The card was hyped to be close to 970 in performance, but slightly cut down, hence a possible explanation for why NV held it back to prevent cannibalizing 970's sales. Maybe that card will be the 960Ti not the 960. A 960 seems to be half of a 980 instead. I don't think $199 is a great price for a Next gen card with a 680 performance when for $50-75, one can easily step up to an after-market 290 with just 6% lower performance to a 970 and more or less identical performance at 1440p. How good a card is should be relative to the current market not just to the 680 which will turn 3 years old in March 2015! Someone on a true budget could just buy a used 280X/7970Ghz/680 4GB. This goes back to my post made above.
Imo a 2GB card at $200-250 from either AMD or NV is poor value unless someone is playing less demanding games and at low resolutions, but that gamer could just get a $130 270/270X or a $150-160 R9 280.
I think this generation a lot of people's standards have fallen drastically with the focus now almost entirely shifting away from performance and price/performance to power usage and performance/watt.
I think a lot of people forgot what the videocard's primary purpose is - it's not to save you electicity costs while gaming. There are many times where AMD's and NV's mid-range cards seem overpriced out of the gate though. 285 and 960 seem to be obvious ones recently.